Terry Glavin: The questions Ottawa doesn’t want us asking about rotten yuan in Canadian real estate. Billions of dollars in rotten yuan got stashed away in Canadian real estate. Now, President Xi is determined to get as much of that money back as he can and to muscle Canada into handing over the culprits.

There are quite a few things that Foreign Affairs Minister Rob Nicholson and Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney would rather not discuss about their government’s role in the handling of tens of thousands of jet-setting Chinese multimillionaires and the dilemma of dealing with the Beijing regime’s increasingly long-armed, vindictive and ferocious police-state apparatus. There is an election coming up, after all. The opposition parties, too, have their own reasons for wishing it would all just go away. But it won’t, at least not for a growing number of wage-earning Canadians. The Canadian housing market is overvalued by 35 per cent compared to Canadian incomes, and 89 per cent compared to rents. Chinese money, of the hot and cold type as well as the clean and dirty variety, is no minor factor in the calamity. In Vancouver, as much as half the dollar value of detached housing sales went to Mainland Chinese buyers last year. Most of the $3 billion poured into the purchase of west-side Vancouver properties last year originated in China, a reflection of the spike in Chinese money that has entered Canada since China’s ruthless Xi Jinping took charge three years ago.

There is also the predicament of all those voters who have mortgaged themselves to the hilt on the bet that their houses are going to continue to rise in market value. “The Conservatives want all of this to go away and not be noticed, and not just the Conservatives, either. Nobody wants to say anything that might cause the property bubble to deflate a bit, certainly not before the election,” the veteran diplomat Martin Collacott told me the other day. A former Foreign Affairs director-general for security services and a Chinese-speaking negotiator in the lead-up to Canada’s diplomatic recognition of China in 1970, Collacott says Beijing has got us all over a barrel.

The case of Vancouver property developer Michael Ching isn’t helping to quieten things down. Ching is either some sort of embezzler and a fugitive from justice back in China, or an upstanding would-be Canadian citizen of nearly 20 unblemished years’ standing who deserves the asylum he’s seeking here. The latest developments in Ching’s story reveal him as a person of lavish generosity in his political contributions, especially to Liberal party accounts, and his daughter has turned out to be none other than Linda Ching, president of the Liberals’ youth wing in British Columbia.

Political hay is not easy to make of any of this.

A lot of it is bound up in the Immigrant Investor Program, a racket championed by the previous Liberal government but avoided by the New Democratic Party for reasons arising largely from twitchiness about insinuations of “Sinophobia” and a bias against foreign investment. Before the scheme was shut down last year, the Conservative government had issued permanent-residency certificates to more than 50,000 investor-class immigrants, mostly from China.